April, 2011

Heart of a champion, head of Quasimodo. On the bright side, this is a star-making loss for Mark Hominick. He gave Jose Aldo everything he could handle (especially in the dominant finish to the fifth round), and picked up tons of new fans in the process. Now somebody get that kid an Aspirin…

All praise be to Master Steven Seagal. Or Ralph Macchio. One of the two. Lyoto Machida‘s incredible jumping front-kick KO of Randy Couture at UFC 129 netted him the event’s Knockout of the Night bonus, which came out to a whopping $129,000. (See what Dana did there?) The UFC can certainly afford it, since UFC 129′s gate revenue was reportedly $12.075 million.

Also picking up $129k bonuses: Jose Aldo and Mark Hominick (Fight of the Night) for their epic five-round featherweight title bout, and Pablo Garza for his flying triangle over Yves Jabouin in the first preliminary match.

Another look at the Machida/Couture KO is after the jump. Gifs via The Destroyer88.

What will 55,000 screaming Canadians sound like? Our best guess: Loud, but polite. That politeness may well be tested prior to tonight’s main event, when California hippie Jake Shields takes the cage. The UFC – and champion Georges St. Pierre – have gone out of their way this week to cast Shields as the biggest threat yet to St. Pierre’s dominance. That in and of itself is interesting, since a year or two ago you likely wouldn’t have been able to get anyone from the UFC to admit Shields was better than guys like Josh Koscheck or Thiago Alves for any amount of money. It is truly a new day in MMA, kids. Anyways, we’ll be live with results and commentary of the PPV card beginning at 9 p.m. EST time. Don’t forget to hit refresh early and often to keep up with the latest updates.

Speaking of Fan Expos, the UFC has officially announced that their next one will take place October 7th and 8th at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. The two-day event will coincide with a yet-to-be-announced UFC pay-per-view card on 10/8, which will likely be hosted at the Toyota Center.

Weigh-ins for UFC 129: St-Pierre vs. Shields went down yesterday at the Ricoh Coliseum in Toronto, with all 24 fighters making weight. Well, basically. Ben Henderson hit the scales at 156.5, and was given an hour to lose that extra half-pound, which he did. Bendo didn’t look too happy being on the scale in the first place; the tough cut might be a factor in his fight against Mark Bocek. Later, Mark Hominick‘s weight was announced at 145.25. There is no one-pound allowance for UFC title fights, but the match was OK’d anyway. Possible explanations include miscommunication and the overly trusting nature of Canadians.

In other weigh-in weirdness, Lyoto Machida brought Steven Seagal with him during his face-off against Randy Couture (you can find a rather amazing photo of that moment after the jump), and Ivan Menjivar showed up with a Wolverine claw that definitely didn’t look like it came from a toy store. Just seemed kind of unsafe, that’s all.

Come back to CagePotato.com tonight for live results from the UFC 129 broadcast; remember, Spike TV prelims start at 8 p.m. ET, and the pay-per-view starts at 9.

We recently spoke with UFC featherweight contender Mark Hominick and discussed a number of things from his upcoming UFC 129 championship bout with Jose Aldo tomorrow night to how he mentally prepares to prove his detractors that he’s no underdog.

Despite the fact that not even the guy who signs the checks believes him, Randy Couture has his story and he’s sticking to it: He’s absolutely, definitely, 100 percent retiring after UFC 129 this weekend. You know what? Through the sheer repetition of it all, we’re actually starting to think he might be serious. What you see above is Couture’s Thursday appearance on Toronto’s CP24 “Breakfast” morning show, where he reiterates that his MMA career is about to enter its final 24 hours, talks up the UFC fan expo and admits he gets a little creeped-out when fans and other fighters treat him like some kind of ageless god.

Frankly, it’s nice to see an MMA athlete get such friendly and even-handed treatment from a mainstream television show. You taking notes, American TV? Things get a little dicey there near the end, when Couture and the CP24 host disagree on exactly how awesome it is to watch the UFC in HD, but they smooth things over by giving away from some tickets to the fan expo. Oh, and maybe the best part? There are some scattered highlights of him beating up James Toney. We’d almost forgotten how goofy that was.

Now, we aren’t sure if it’s because he paid a visit to his buddy Matt Lindland’s shed before shooting this impromptu “interview” or because he was playing a few rounds of ”puff, puff, give” with Eddie Bravo, but Chael Sonnen seems a lot more relaxed and squinty-eyed in the latest edition of Mastering the System.

One of the many reasons this video from Thursday’s M-1 Challenge 25 event is handy is because a guy with a reverb-y announcer voice actually explains who Vinny Magalhaes and Viktor Nemkov are before they fight for the organization’s vacant light heavyweight title. Sure, maybe they use an “alternate” spelling of Magalhaes’ name in the graphic at the beginning, but we’re not sweating the small stuff. The other cool thing is that the play-by-play announcers just carry on a conversation with each other, almost as if they don’t know we’re listening. And did we mention the pre-fight choreography? Simply amazing.

The bad news is that all that silliness means the actual fight doesn’t even start until the 7:50 mark. But whoa, holy shit, check out that M-1 belt being toted around the ring at 6:22. Shit looks like they just glued some scrap metal onto an old piece of leather.